`Justice' Debuts With Bruckheimer Baggage

TV EYE

`Bones' Begins New Season

August 30, 2006|By ROGER CATLIN

``Justice'' (Fox, 9 p.m.) is the first of two new courtroom sagas on the fall schedule. Victor Garber, with barely a rest from the finale of ``Alias,'' is back as the head of a high-profile Los Angeles defense team that basks in the media limelight.

Unfortunately, because the series is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, there's something overly familiar about the proceedings, including the superfluous special effects that show, at one point, electricity coursing through the wires in a room of test jurors.

It's also not a good sign that the first case tonight is so obviously based on the one so brilliantly captured in Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's documentary series ``The Staircase,'' which was subsequently chopped into ``20/20'' episodes.

The lapses of ``Justice'' are a shame, because it follows the welcome return of one of the smartest crime series on TV, ``Bones'' (Fox, 8 p.m.).

Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz continue their flinty partnership among the grisly cases, which play out weekly while a bigger one -- the death of her mother -- will unfurl slowly over a longer term. And new in the office is a boss, played by Tamara Taylor, who shares a romantic past with Boreanaz's character.

Remote Patrol

Morgan Spurlock gets involved in an episode of his own strong series, ``30 Days'' (FX, 10 p.m.), just in time for the second-season finale. To investigate how the penal system is working, he spends nearly 30 days at the Henrico County Jail in Richmond, Va., for an eye-opening look at how prisoners are treated these days and his own reactions to it. He gets to spend 72 hours in solitary, work 15-hour shifts in the kitchen, is allowed only one hour a week for exercise and has to share a cell with up to three other inmates.

Before she went into labor earlier this month, Elizabeth Vargas learned what she was getting her newborn son into by preparing a two-hour ``20/20'' (ABC, 9 p.m.) about seven cataclysms that could befall the Earth including gamma-ray burst, the eruption of a super-volcano and nuclear war. Unlike Matt Lauer, whose wife is also expecting and did a similar special recently, Vargas does not include either robot uprisings or alien invasion.